Wilson Signs Bill on Deadbeat Parents : Legislation: The measure allows seizure of driver’s licenses from those who owe child support.

Deadbeat parents, beware: Your driving days are numbered.

Escalating the war against those who refuse to pay court-ordered child support, Gov. Pete Wilson on Thursday signed a bill allowing authorities to seize the driver’s licenses of parents who don’t pay up.

“If you abandon your responsibility to your child . . . you forfeit the freedoms and opportunities that come with being a responsible citizen,” Wilson said. “We cannot and will not tolerate parents who walk away from their children.”

The law, which takes effect Jan. 1, signals a get-tough trend emerging as states search for creative solutions to the mushrooming problem of unpaid child support. In California, more than $5 billion is owed in cases affecting 3.4 million children.

In their effort to turn deadbeat parents into upstanding ones, states have tried everything from hanging “most wanted” posters in subways to using their tax authority to withhold money from a debtor’s payroll check.

California’s new driver’s license law mirrors programs that have proven highly successful elsewhere. In Maine, for instance, $28 million in delinquent child support was collected after 221,000 parents were threatened with seizure of their licenses. Only 25 of those parents defied the law and lost the right to drive.

In California--a state with one of the poorest records of child support enforcement-- officials predict that the new law will help them collect an additional $84 million a year in unpaid child support. The potential loss of driving privileges is a powerful threat that seems to spur those who ignore more polite warnings, advocates of the tactic say.

“For some people, a poignant public service message is all that is needed to make them take responsibility and pay what is owed,” said Leslie Frye, chief of the state’s Office of Child Support. “But for many others, the risk of losing their driver’s license may be what’s needed to reach them.”

One San Fernando Valley mother of two, who calculates that her ex-husband owes $110,000 in back payments and interest, agreed that the new approach “might force some deadbeats to clean up their act.”

But she was not optimistic about her own former spouse--”If he loses his license, he’ll probably hire a chauffeur”--and lamented that the law does not go far enough.

“These new hammers are fine, but what we need is a total overhaul of the system,” she said. “Otherwise, these guys will just keep finding clever ways to avoid their obligations.”

Critics, meanwhile, say seizing a parent’s driver’s license will create hardships and make it less likely that any money will flow.

“Taking away someone’s means of getting to work isn’t going to promote payment,” said Lori Crabb of the Coalition of Parent Support, which lobbies on behalf of non-custodial parents. “We agree there’s a problem, but this just isn’t sensible.”

The bill’s author, however, counters that the law gives a delinquent parent a generous grace period to comply. After receiving a warning notice from the Department of Motor Vehicles, a driver in arrears on child support has up to 10 months to settle the debt--or agree to a long-term repayment program tailored to his budget.

“This law has lots of due process protections built into it,” said Assemblywoman Jackie Speier (D-Burlingame), the bill’s author. “It gives a person plenty of time to get on the road to responsibility.”

Long neglected, the problem of unpaid child support has exploded to staggering proportions recently.

Nationwide, an estimated $34 billion of court-ordered child support remains uncollected.

While many parents default on child support orders because of true financial troubles, others can afford to pay but use aliases, shift funds among numerous bank accounts or move frequently to avoid detection. The self-employed are particularly hard to catch, as they often use creative bookkeeping to appear broke on paper.

Gradually, new laws--and increasingly sophisticated computers--are giving authorities more powerful tools in the hunt for deadbeats. In one notorious case made possible by a new federal law, the FBI recently jailed a successful precious metals consultant on charges that he owes more than $500,000 in child support for three children in New York.

In his remarks Thursday, the governor said that while the most innocent victims of the problem are America’s youngsters, taxpayers also suffer--through payment of welfare. Studies show that the large majority of children who receive public assistance do so because a parent is not paying what’s owed.

Parents who are owed child support generally praised the new law, saying any new weapon should help.

Consider the case of a Sacramento County mother of two who says she has been forced to live in her parents’ living room because her ex-husband owes nearly $13,000 in back payments. Occasionally, she said, the children’s father will buy them shoes. But until recently he had mostly ignored his $499 monthly child support obligation.

“He’s done everything imaginable to duck out,” said the mother who was on welfare for several years but now has a full-time job. “Lately, he’s been talking about driving a truck for his dad. If he thinks he’s going to lose his driver’s license, then he might get nervous and send the money.”

Despite their enthusiasm for the law, she and others predict there will be no dramatic improvement without major structural change in California’s child support collection system. Critics of that system--which is based at the county level and run by the district attorney’s office--note that a recent report by an advocacy group ranked the state 44th in the nation in child support enforcement.

“What we have now isn’t working, and mothers [trying to collect] are simply getting worn out and giving up,” said Susan Speir, president of Spunk, a Long Beach child support education group. Among solutions Speir and others favor are creating a single state agency to handle child support enforcement.

In the meantime, there is evidence to suggest the driver’s license law will make some debtors take heed. In 1992, the state launched a highly successful program that seizes the professional licenses of deadbeats--everyone from contractors to doctors, security guards and mechanics.

In one example, a Fresno real estate agent who owed $30,000 in delinquent support paid the entire amount after the state Department of Real Estate threatened to revoke his broker’s license.

In another instance, a Los Angeles lawyer who owed more than $140,000 in child support began paying his children $2,000 a month after the State Bar refused to renew his license to practice law.